An Honest Whore, A Dishonest President

Okay, here’s the complicated story, in case you haven’t been following it. Anastasia Vashukevich is a Belarusian woman who, it appears, works as a very high-class escort…or, if you prefer, maybe “sex worker” is the term we should use. In any case, she has connections with Oleg V. Deripaska, a powerful Russian oligarch.

Deripaska, in turn, is a long-term business associate of Paul J. Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman and tops on Mueller’s list of interesting people.

The kicker is that, somehow, certain conversations on one of those yacht trips were video taped, by someone. Maybe Vashuevich herself. She even posted part of them to her Instagram account. (She also seems to have written a book about her time on the yacht, with the names changed.) Then, those recordings—and a great deal more—were obtained by Aleksei A. Navalny, a Russian opposition figure. He posted them to Youtube (see below).

Then, Vashuevich happened to go to Thailand, where she was said to be teaching a seminar on sex. There, she was arrested for not having a proper visa. She is now a detainee in Bangkok awaiting possible deportation to Belarus, and, maybe a rather unpleasant fate at the hands of Belarusian and Russian authorities.

So, she contacted the American consul and made several high profile statements to journalists saying that she had multiple hours of audio recordings of Russian officials discussing, again, their meddling in the American election and their influence on Trump. She will, she says, give those recordings to American officials if they give her asylum in the US.

Messy, isn’t it?

It would be wonderful if American authorities could get access to any such recordings, if they really exist. But, as of press time, there seems to be little movement toward extracting Ms. Vashukevich from Thailand.

And besides, with Russian authorities eager to keep her from talking, and an American president not particularly eager to hear what she has to say…